Ludum Dare 16 is coming up, the weekend of December 11-13. In case you don’t know, somehow, Ludum Dare is a solo 48-hour game development competition. The competition has been getting bigger and bigger with every iteration of the event, with the last one bringing in a total of 144 entries. If you’re not planning to participate, or if you don’t have time… I’m sad for you. I mean, it’s ridiculously fun. It’s a learning experience. It’s also filled with a bunch of people that are crazy enough to try to make a game on their own in as little as 48 hours. Lack of sleep can be an issue, too, but sleep-deprived programming sprees can really complete the experience.

That is all.

If you haven’t heard already, there have been some exciting events for game developers lately, specifically the new accessibility and usability of the Unreal Engine 3 and Unity engine that have been getting a lot of attention. From what I’ve read, the general thought among developers and those reporting on the topic, is that it will be a boon, a brand new opportunity for the general of mass of game makers. And so it would seem, but exactly what effects will it have on independent developers as a group?

There are a few things that I wonder about, and I’d like to hear your thoughts too. First, while the Unreal Engine 3 is undoubtedly a powerful and excellent engine, how easy is it for the typical indie team (or even lone developer) to make something of quality with it? It’s a monster of an engine, and to benefit from anywhere near all of its many facets would take a sizable team. Teams like that do exist, but they’re usually already working on big projects on heavyweight engines. More commonly in the independent game development world, teams are small, or even single people. Secondly, independent developers that are serious enough to make quality games have used the Unity engine before. Will it be a big jump for independent development, or just something that people tinker around with because it’s there?

Don’t get me wrong, I definitely see value in both of these engines’ new statuses. At the very least, it will open some new doors for serious developers, and be another learning tool for beginners. Please leave your comments.

Mike Kasprzak, also known as PoV, is the man behind Sykhronics Entertainment. He offered an enlightening talk with me about his games, Ludum Dare and more.

Entar: Please introduce yourself, in whatever fashion you deem necessary, and describe some of the projects you’ve been working on.
PoV: Hi there, I’m Mike Kasprzak. I’ve been making games most of my life, and professionally for the past 10 years. I’ve worked on numerous console and mobile games, the majority for Nintendo platforms, but am diversifying. More recently I’m better known for my iPhone game Smiles, which launched almost exactly a year ago today (yesterday actually).

Entar: How did Smiles get started? What sources of inspiration did you have for the game?
PoV: Smiles started as one of several game prototypes I was making. When iPhone OS 2.0 was announced along with the SDK in early 2008, I started experimenting with some game ideas. I iterated through several concepts, and came to the conclusion that “Pattern Trade” (later renamed Smiles) would be the quickest of the more interesting prototypes to finish.

Entar: What are your opinions on iPhone development, especially as it compares to development for other platforms?
PoV: In general I like it. It was a little weird at first, as most platforms I’m familiar with I code in straight C or C++ with an API (or a list of hardware registers). Developing for iPhone OS was different in that I had to wrap various OS calls from ObjC in such a way that my C and C++ code could work with it. I’m a pretty heavy portability nut, so I like being able to run the exact same code on several platforms. I am a weird case though. Most normal people developing for iPhone would have plenty positive to say about X-Code, but for me it’s just where the compile+run button is. In fact, most of my actual development wasn’t even on the Mac, but on the PC instead.

Entar: What are your goals for Sykhronics Entertainment? What do you want to achieve with it that you couldn’t do in your roles at other companies?
PoV: Sykhronics (sans the Entertainment part) was a label/branding I started using some 12-13 years ago for my independent game works. Before that I’d gone by several game company’ish names (notably Gamma Flare Games), but I wanted something more individualistic. Something not so generic as some of my early names. Something distinct. So Sykhronics was my “Mike Brand”. My art, my blog, my games, all creations of Sykhronics. So with that in mind, when it came time for me to establish a proper company, I went with what was already familiar. The goal of Sykhronics Entertainment is much the same as the goal of Sykhronics. The branding of the stuff I want to create. Just now, it’s a legal company. What Sykhronics isn’t going to be is a larger corporation. Sykhronics will always be “The Mike Stuff” branding. Whether it’s entirely self produced or collaborative, if Mike was involved, you’ll (probably) see a Sykhronics sticker on it. What’s changed between what I used to do and what I do now is I get to make the games I want to. Most of what I did was work-for-hire. We a developer would, given a license, produce a game for a publisher. We did it this way because the money was somewhat predictable, and running a proper company has overhead costs. So what’s had to change is the overhead costs. I run the company out of my home, so that cuts out the need for office space. When needed I hire outside contractors, which also cuts out the need for office space. Though with Smiles, it was produced entire by myself, which has some pretty great overhead cost advantages. The code, art, sound, all me.

Entar: Describe PuffBOMB and some of the history behind that project.
PoV: PuffBOMB was a game I created in 2003 for the Ludum Dare 48 hour game making competition. It started out as me playing around with particle effects, and somehow got the inspiration to take a stab at making a physics game… with only a mediocre understanding of physics. Surprisingly, I actually got the game working and somewhat playable in the initial 48 hours. It had (I think) 3 hardcoded levels in it originally, two of them very similar to each other. When I had finished, I realized I was on to a pretty novel game concept. In the weeks that followed, I further refined and improved the game. By the time the smoke from the competition cleared, it had 10 maps and some acceptable art behind it. The game went on to be featured by several freeware gaming sites, and was included on several gaming magazine coverdisks. One of the people in our Ludum Dare IRC channel created a level editor for the game, which has allowed many people to create original levels for the game. Some 2 years later I decided to pick-up the old code and reskin the game. The reskin was further picked up by several freeware sites and game magazines, but the goal was to enter the game in the IGF and Slamdance competitions. And actually, PuffBOMB was a finalist for a special award at Slamdance 2006. It didn’t win, but hey, nominations are still good. Later that year, I began production of a game tentatively tiled “PuffBOMB HD”. I suppose a PuffBOMB remake had been in production on and off since I released the original game, but late 2006 is when things got real. I had my brother working with me as a tools programmer, and in early 2007 I began looking for an Artist to contract some art to. We found somebody great, and made some really great strides towards a proper commercial game. But… well, lets just say we learned some very important lessons with “PuffBOMB HD”. The project was officially shelved some time around October 2007. I still have all the assets and code, that I hope to put to good use some time in the future.

Entar: Describe Ludum Dare, and your role(s) in it.
PoV: Ludum Dare is kind-of 2 things. It’s part game development community, and other part game development competition. Geoff Howland started a forum called Ludum Dare some … well I’m not sure when the forum started. But the competition started in April of 2002. The idea originally was to make a game in 24 hours. Intrigued by the absurdly short schedule, I stopped by the official IRC channel to say hello. Pretty quickly I went from “some guy” to “fellow moderator” in the channel. I’d been making games professionally for a couple years by then, so I imagine that layer of game industry cred may have worked to my advantage. Plus I proved to be an excellent target for Canadian based humor, so it worked out well for all of us. So for me, Ludum Dare became my little “outside work” thing I’d do. Book the weekend off, and power away at a themed game. By the 2nd competition, Ludum Dare had become what it still is today. A solo “create a game in 48 hours” competition. In the early years, my role was “that guy who made sure we ran a competition in April”. Today though, I like to think of my role as the figurehead. As in, guy who acts as the leader, but has no actual authority . I suppose I do actually have authority, but I like to be sure the 4 of us have had a say before I do something dramatic. Still, I’m the guy who writes all the e-mails and does most of the PR.

Entar: Are you happy with Ludum Dare as it is now, or would you change its direction?
PoV: For the most part I am. Most of the things I want to change are changing. The biggest thing stopping said changes is my own time to commit to Ludum Dare. Ludum Dare is something the 4 of us do in our spare time on our own dollar. The community does help us out with the hosting costs, but we still need to find the time to orchestrate everything. All 4 of us are independent game developers running our own separate businesses, and that eats up a lot of our time. Ludum Dare isn’t exactly something we can do for profit (that’d defeat the purpose), so it’s a weird balancing act for us.

Entar: What advice or comments would you give to independent game developers?
PoV: Have a lot of patience, and a large enough savings account to screw up for a while… because you will.

Entar: What are some of your favorite games out there today, independent or otherwise?
PoV: I used to play a lot more, but most of what I’m in to are RPG’s and Metroidvanias. The Diablo series I adore, as well as the Disgaea games and pretty much anything by that team at Nippon Ichi. All the recent 2D Castlevanias I seem to put many hours in to. From SOTN to the latest DS game. Aquaria I quite enjoyed too. I’m a Commodore 64 computer nerd too, so I have many classic favorites there too. Master of Magic, Neuromancer, and several more.

Entar: What plans do you have for the future?
PoV: Currently I’m working on some ports of Smiles to a bunch of platforms. PC, Linux, Mac, as well as some other mobile devices. There’s also a Smiles related project that’s looking quite promising. I should hopefully be starting on that shortly. And then once I’m Smiled out, I’ll either be getting back to my RPG project or perhaps something PuffBOMB related.

Entar: Thank you for your time.

World of Goo, the excellent indie puzzle game by 2DBoy recently turned one year old! Congratulations, 2DBoy!

To celebrate, this week only (until October 19th 25th), they are selling the game for whatever price you think it’s worth. It’s normally sold for $20. It’s an awesome deal for an awesome game, so I thought you’d want to know.

Left 4 Dead by Valve Software is a first-person shooter that fits into a lot of categories. First-person, action, survival, shooter, and, of course, zombies. The player is put in one of many environments, each overrun by zombies, with three other survivors trying to fight their way to some means of escape.

From the brief description I’ve given so far, if you were one of those few that hadn’t played this game, you might have thought that the quality of such a game could go either way. I mean, we’ve seen lots of zombie survival games before, with mixed results. Fortunately, Valve nailed almost every quality in this title. Left 4 Dead shows a careful design toward teamwork and cooperative play, and as such, the game is best played with 3 other friends. Survivors may be healed by other survivors if they become injured, or revived in the case of being incapacitated. If your team is being rushed by a two-hundred zombie horde and some 10-foot monster (and I mean “rushed,” you will find very few snail-paced stumbling zombies here), you all had better use your weapons and explosives together, and to great effect. In moments like these, the action becomes quite intense, and players quickly become wrapped up in the action.

The graphics are excellent, there are several types of zombies to keep things fresh, enough choices of weapons and explosives to give the player strategic options, and the level design produces an atmosphere filled with details and effects that complete the zombie survival experience. There is also a versus mode, where four players fight as survivors in one of the campaigns toward rescue, while the other four play as special zombies, along with hundreds of computer controlled zombies, to stop the survivors. It’s a fairly interesting gameplay mode, and faster-paced than a normal campaign. It’s not especially groundbreaking, and playing as the infected seems a little glitchy sometimes, but it brings a competitive multiplayer side to the game. There is also a Survival mode, which challenges players to stay alive against a huge and nearly constant supply of zombies, for as long as possible, which makes for very tense and concentrated combat.

There were a couple of things that bothered me though. While the environments and areas are nicely varied, the gameplay of each campaign is very similar to the others. The survivors start out toward rescue of some kind, and from time to time they must do something which allows them to continue or even escape completely, but also alerts a horde of zombies to their presence, resulting in a big stand against hundreds of zombies. These are great scenes, but I saw them coming by the time I finished the game. This brings me to the other bother: there is almost no story of any kind. All the player can gather is that they are stranded somewhere, where there happen to be many, many zombies, and they wish to leave said environment. For some reason, the same survivors become stranded in these zombie-infested regions several times. There are somewhat likable and interesting characters, but no back-stories. There are thousands of zombies, but no apparent cause, and no work toward cure or resolution to said crisis. It seems like Valve had a good opportunity, but they didn’t really include any of that facet of the atmosphere. I realize that zombie stories may be tough to work out without a cheesy result, so maybe Valve simply decided against it for that reason. Luckily, though, Valve did such a good job otherwise that you hardly notice these things most of the time.

Overall, Valve did a great job with this one. Left 4 Dead must be one of the best games in terms of cooperative play and intense action that I’ve played. It lacks a bit in story elements, but it more than makes up for it with heavy, fast-paced action and strategic teamwork.

Feel free to leave comments with your take on the game or the review.

Launch of the Screaming Narwhal is the first episode in Telltale Games‘ new Tales of Monkey Island adventure series. The player is given control of Guybrush Threepwood, the Mighty Pirate, during his swashbuckling adventures which involve all manner of piratey plot elements, such as cannons, voodoo, bombs, and… glass unicorns?

I haven’t been that big of a fan of the third-person adventure puzzle genre, and it’s still probably not one of my favorite types of game, but I did like this game in general. It has a great sense of humor to keep things fresh; the main character is fairly witty, but all of the contents of the game are filled with humor. I mean, what other game are you going to find where you try to cover a cutlass with root beer in order to enchant it and vanquish the evil demon/zombie pirate LeChuck? The puzzles in the game were, for the most part, reasonable in terms of difficulty. In some games of this type, when I encounter a particularly annoying and/or vague puzzle, I see the gameplay degrade until I eventually wander around the game world, randomly clicking on things. In Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, I didn’t find myself in that situation so much. One slight disappointment was that at the very start of the game, the setting is exciting and interesting, but shortly into the story, I was met with the usual slow atmosphere that most games of this genre display. By the end of the game though, I hoped a little that the game would be a bit longer, but it’s the first episode of a five-part series which is cheaper than most single new games, so I can’t really complain.

I never played any of the older Monkey Island games, so I may have missed any nostalgia that other players may enjoy. That aside though, Tales of Monkey Island is casual, silly fun. Nothing groundbreaking or exceptionally awesome so far, but fun.

I had been working on this project for quite some time, but it took me a while to iron out one last bug. Finally, I have it completed. RainSaver is a screensaver (so far just for Windows) that warps the current screen using fragment shaders, creating a warpy raindrop-on-water effect for your screen. It also darkens the screen a little, to further protect the screen. The program uses SDL and OpenGL.

You may also notice that there is now an “Other Projects” page, since there wasn’t really another good place to put a project like RainSaver. I don’t know how often I’ll do projects like this, as this site is primarily about games, but if I start a project that has certain related aspects like this one did, I’ll probably stick it in that section.

Two weeks of game testing and voting are finally complete, and the results of Ludum Dare 15 have been revealed! The theme was “Caverns,” and there was another record breaking number of entries, 144! You can view complete results on the Ludum Dare 15 results page, but here are the results from my entry, Cave of Peril:

Out of 144 entries:
Overall: 35th (3.27 / 5.00)
Graphics: 19th (3.80 / 5.00)
Audio: 30th (3.07 / 5.00)
Fun: 47th (2.83 / 5.00)
Innovation: 51st (2.90 / 5.00)
Theme: 14th (3.87 / 5.00)
Humor: 65th (2.17 / 5.00)

Considering the number of entries, and the time period for development, I’m pretty happy with the results. You can view my Ludum Dare 15 journal here. The rest of the games submitted for the competition can be found here. There were some really creative and interesting ones this time around, so check them out!

I have been trying my hand at publishing a lot of different categories, all relating to games, of course. I want to get a better idea of what readers are looking for on my blog, so I thought I’d start this little poll and get your input. The question is simple: what types of content do you want to see more of here? Feel free to comment to give more specific detail as you feel is necessary.

After talking with Joseph Larson and seeing his work on games like ASCIIpOrtal, I thought it was time I revived an old realtime rendering text based project of mine. Behold, Text Adventures Without Swords (TAWS) Volume 7 is complete! It’s a simple top-down shooter that gets harder as you go, until you finally give way to the oncoming battalions.

It was my first experience with the library PDCurses, and I was very happy with it. It’s pretty simple to setup a project, and you can generally do whatever you need to do, as long as you have the documentation handy to find what you need.

You can pick up the zip package here, but don’t forget to check out the rest of the TAWS Series. Have fun!